BRANFORD — The Able Hand measured 38 feet and 6 inches long. It was built like a Steinway, with the graceful lines of a bird in flight and the majesty of a Rembrandt. Crafted in 1928, it was a wedding gift to Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh from her parents. The couple spent their 1929 honeymoon on the cruiser.

When William Payson, of Westport, bought the boat in 1969, the Able Hand was in a state of abject disrepair. He brought it to Branford’s Dutch Wharf Boatyard & Marina to be restored.

Two years and 22,000 man hours later, a group played lively big-band music for about 1,000 people assembled at the marina as the Able Hand, “a sparkling union of brass, varnished wood, and white hull,” as the New York Times put it, was launched and rechristened onto the Branford River.

“That 1971 restoration really put us on the map,” said Dutch Wharf’s irrepressible owner, Paul Jacques, on a recent morning in one of the cluster of buildings in the boatyard behind Harbor Package Store on Maple Street.

“And that’s the beauty of a wooden boat,” the 60-year-old Orange resident added. “It’s made of pieces — the keel, the stem, the stern. If one of those becomes worn or aged, it can simply be replaced. This is why a wooden boat lasts after years of neglect and repair. Its beauty only increases with age.”

Jacques’ father Jack started Dutch Wharf in 1957 as a small boat-repair facility on the Branford River. He’d grown up on Ellsworth Avenue in New Haven. “When he was 8, his best friend’s father took them out sailing and after that he knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life,” Jacques said.

At 15, Jack Jacques quit high school and joined the Merchant Marines. He was at sea for 11 years. After his father’s death, Jacques learned his ship was sunk by a German submarine on the Atlantic. Jack and five other guys ended up on a life boat for a week. Only three of them made it.

In the year Jacques was born, Jack opened the yard. “He named it Dutch Wharf because this site is where Dutch traders in the 17th century unloaded their cargo of exotic wood from around the world and established one of the earliest lumber yards in the U.S.,” Jacques said.

“He loved the history and he loved classic wooden boats, both working on them and sailing them.”

So did Bruce Burdge, Jack’s first full-time employee, who worked at the yard for 53 years. Jacques keeps his photo under a piece of glass on his desk. “He was a Hall of Famer,” said the long-time Yankees fan, who’s blessed, it seems, with an encyclopedic memory of virtually every employee, customer and boat that’s ever graced the yard.

Take Tom Nerkowski, a Pearl Harbor survivor and another Hall of Famer, whose black-and-white is also under the glass. “He and my dad were friends in the Sea Scouts in 1933 when they were 13,” Jacques said. When Nerkowski had to close his Fair Haven boatyard, he started a 28-year career at Dutch Wharf at his old friend’s invitation, retiring when he was 86.

Then there’s current foreman Sam Smith, whom Jacques described as having “the demeanor of a canoe paddler, while inside he’s going at Mach 2.” Smith was running his own yard in Hawaii when he saw an ad in Wooden Boat Magazine. “Next thing you know, Sam is showing up here for work,” he said.

“I knew Dutch Wharf by their international reputation,” said Smith, who’s originally from New England. “They do what I love to do, which is work on classic boats, so it was an easy decision.”

For Bill Clapp, the draw was similar. The Navy veteran and longtime Short Beach resident worked at the phone company before retiring at 54 and starting at Dutch Wharf not long after.

“He’s a master of all trades, a great mentor, a great sailor,” Smith said. When Clapp lost his wife a year-and-a-half ago, he retired and sailed solo to Vero Beach, Fla., and back on the 26-foot wooden Vertue. He was 80.

“He sees the wooden boat as a living thing,” Jacques said, the gravel of the boatyard crunching under his shoes in the sea-salt air. “They speak to him of history, of mastery, of craftsmanship. They’re the reason why, at 80, he was still here.”

Among the boats with a hold on Clapp was the hypnotic Ayesha, a 46-foot yawl, a photo of which, regal on tumultuous waters, occupies a wall in Jacques’ office. Built in 1932 from blueprints of Philip L. Rhodes, among the most distinguished yacht designers of the past century, it has “a deck made from rows of long, narrow planks, then steamed and bent like the limb of an archer’s bow,” as writer Molly Hensley-Clancy describes it.

According to Jacques, an owner had kept Ayesha at the yard from 1967 to 1979, when securities lawyer Endicott Davison bought it. “I remember how happy my father was, he called me at college to tell me the news,” Jacques said. Davison contracted Dutch Wharf for a 20,000 man-hour restoration that took three years. The current owner, Joseph Robillard, said Jacques, keeps Ayesha “in showroom condition.”

The serial history of ownership is telling. “Like a lot of wooden boats, Ayesha is timeless,” Jacques said. "The owners are just her stewards. They’re entrusted with her care and they’re in turn gifted with the joy she affords.”

Which explains the premium on artistry practiced by master craftsmen like Dana Johnson. “I love the start to finish about refinishing, taking a piece of wood that’s in pretty bad shape, and turning it into something gorgeous,” he said, before describing how his cousin, Keith Johnson, demonstrates his acumen in painting and refinishing by using a coin to ensure a “crisp rounded edge for a nonskid paint job.”

Little wonder, perhaps, that customers flock from all over to the unassuming Branford boatyard. The 50-foot Murray Peterson schooner owned by the father and son from Germany, for example. “We’ve been working on it and they’ve been working on it,” Jacques said. “Eventually they’re going to sail it over to Germany,”

There’s also Sylvia Lachter, of Long Island, who was having her Mystic 30 sailboat outfitted with a new beta engine. “I think it’s just wonderful to find a place with an Old World feel and Old World craftsmanship,” she said.

“Being here,” she added, as a seabird swooped across the boatyard and landed on the gleaming masthead of a sloop, “it’s just a privilege.”

The Dutch Wharf Boatyard and Marina is at 70 Maple St. in Branford; dutchwharf.com, 203-488-9000.